The Ericsson T610, Bluetooth, and Mac OS X 10.3

Last summer I decided to get a mobile phone so that my sister, my mom, and I no longer had to share one phone. We signed up for a family plan where we could have three phones on one plan, and each of us got a Nokia GSM mobile phone. This was great - until I moved up to Montreal for university.

While our package with Cingular did offer an upgrade to a North America calling plan, I was still left with a US area code. While this is especially useful for friends and family in the US trying to call me, it isn't especially useful to give out to people in Montreal, who would not only be making a long distance call, but an international one as well. That's when I decided I needed a Montreal area code.

In terms of getting this area code, there were a few options to consider. The first was a regular phone line through Bell Canada. I decided that this would have been the best option had I picked DSL Internet service. Given that I have cable, another option would be an Internet-based phone system like Vonage. Vonage offers service in Canada, however you can only have a Montreal area code as a supplement to a US one. This means that it would be more expensive than the advertised price for one line on their website.

With either of these options I have to be in my apartment to use the phone. Given that I'm out most of the time, this doesn't help me.

The next option was another mobile phone. There seem to be three major providers here in Montreal: Telus, Rogers, and Fido. I chose Fido, went into their store, and signed up for a plan. For $65 (Canadian) a month I get 300 minutes, 250 of which can be used for long distance, as well as unlimited nights and weekends, which start at 7 p.m.

You might be thinking, "What's this all got to do with Macs?" Well, the phone I purchased with a two-year service agreement was an Ericsson T610. I wanted something that had more features than a basic model, something that would hopefully remain reasonably modern for the four years that I will be here.

The T610 is a tri-band phone (it works in Europe as well as North America) that features a color screen, a built in camera, many fun little applications and utilities (such as a calendar, several games, a painting app, a "music DJ" app where you can create ring tones), sound recorder, and probably a number of other things I haven't figured out yet.

Oh, and it's also got Bluetooth.

I'd never actually used Bluetooth before, so I was anxious to give it a try. My 12" PowerBook G4 has Bluetooth built in, so all I had to do was enable it on both the computer and the phone and then search for the phone using Apple's Bluetooth device setup utility. It took only a few seconds, and I was asked to enter a password in the phone, which was displayed on the computer screen. After that, I had access to all of the pictures, sounds, and games on the phone. You can copy images that you took with the camera over from the phone by simply dragging them to the desktop, and it's just as easy to copy things to the phone.

One nice feature this phone has is the ability to play any MIDI file as a ring tone. Just go to a website, download something you like, and copy it over. Themes, games, screen savers, and wallpaper are also things you can download. One very extensive site is http://www.myt610.net/. You can also use your own pictures provided that you size them to 128 x 128.

Apple seems to support the T610 pretty well with OS X 10.3 - it even synchs with iCal and your OS X Address Book! It's nice to see that computers and mobile phones are getting more compatible with each other.

The T610 almost acts like a PDA, where you can store just about everything, and connect it to your computer to view it there. If this is what using a modern phone is like, I can't wait to use a modern PDA.